Virtual Worlds

Martello Technologies has become one of the more interesting players in the SD-WAN space - by purchasing Elfiq - one of the first if not the first players in the space. From there, they combined SD-WAN with service assurance... From quality management to remediation.

According to Tracy King, Director of Marketing, "The layer 2 approach makes it easier to install." She continued, "You just drop in the box and it works."

She continued by explaining the company has subsecond failovers, hybrid WAN solutions, a UC site qualification tool and more. Customers can see in advance how many calls the network can concurrently support.

In addition, they offer a STREAM VPN engine which encrypts per flow and offers zero-touch provisioning.

The LBX700 Link Balancer provides throughput of 800 Mbps, 512 VPN tunnels and support for up to 14 ISPs
Tracy explained there is no limit to how many sites which can be meshed with their new ATLAS SDWAN solution.

After exhaustive interviews with 400 call center professionals and IT administrators, Jabra set out to design headsets for the evolving workplace. Respondents told them, automation was handling the easy tasks leaving the higher value phone calls to be handled by agents.

Also, as rents have climbed, office spaces have gotten smaller and noisier. Open office environments certainly have to be an issue as well.

In a short amount of time Talkdesk has amassed 1,400 global customers according to an exclusive interview we had with CEO, Tiago Paiva (above left; Yours Truly on the right).

We've followed his company's progress since inception and through sheer will and a tremendous investment in engineering and development, the company has lured away many customers from not only legacy systems but other cloud providers. They bill themselves as a next-gen cloud using microservices, an API-driven CPaaS communication layer, built-in SMS, omnichannel and many integrations like Salesforce and ServiceNOW. They also have adopted the latest cybersecurity standards and guidelines such as SOCII, BPDR, HIPAA and PCI-DDS.

Talkdesk AppConnect

Tiago explains much of the reason for the company's rapid growth is due to the fact that nobody likes their contact center solutions. By focusing on things like quick set-up (about four weeks), free online training, AppConnect app store, custom dashboards, self-service changes and data-based routing, the company's commitment to innovation is leading to market share gains.

Talkdesk Data-Based Routing

In addition, the system has an average 4.22 MOS score, greater than 99.99% uptime and six global data centers.

Thanks to RCS, rich messaging will be the default on all mobile devices meaning companies will have the ability to provide superior messaging and marketing to all customers according to Brian Heikes, VP, Product Mangement and Solutions at 3Cinteractive.

They recently launched some of the first campaigns on the Sprint network when they announced their RCS A2P deployment. Prior to this change, Sprint just allowed P2P RCS capability or person-to-person messaging. Now with the MAP solution, organizations now have the full power sending rich marketing messaging to all consumers.

In addition to the benefit of having RCS work on all handsets, its use allows companies to avoid needing to go through a BigTech gatekeeper who mines the data to sell competitive advertising.

In other words, if you look at the Facebook business model - the first step was to get companies to bring all their customers to the Facebook network by liking their pages. The next step was to charge companies for access to their own customers via algorithm changes and advertising.

Digital Transformation is becoming the buzzword of the decade and its meaning is rather broad. We like to call it the application of the latest computing technology to improve business processes. More specifically, using cloud, AI, cognitive computing, mobile, IoT, big, data, and other tech like chatbots and APIs. The list of technology is really never-ending, we could have added sharing economy, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart buildings, mesh networks, blockchain and so on.

Practically speaking, companies need to disrupt themselves or become new disruptors depending on the age of the organization.

Collaboration solutions are one of the most challenging ones to judge in my opinion because the real world and online one are very different. Did any of you use the Second Life virtual world filled with avatars of people to walk or fly around and see the virtual landscape? I played with it a bit but got bored. So did most people.

About eight years ago I held up DiamondWare as a shining example of what communications should be – HD, stereo and 3-D. Nortel later purchased DiamondWare and integrated it into its Project Chainsaw initiative which allowed avatar-based communications. Then these assets were sold to Avaya as part of the Nortel bankruptcy. I am fairly disappointed that this technology never went mainstream.

Recently I had a chance to have an in-depth conversation with Avaya about the trends they see for 2012 in the communications space. In particular I spoke with George Humphrey a Director and Line of Business Owner at Avaya and Diane Royer, Senior Marketing Services Manager.

Games, weather and social networking apps are where people are spending a tremendous amount of their time followed by mapping, news, music and entertainment. These are the results of a new survey from Nielsen which asks what apps people used in the last 30 days. iPhone users who are mobile gamers play about 30 minutes per day on average or 14.7 hours per month while Android users play 9.3 hours per month.

Nielsen supplied chart of apps which smartphone users have downloaded in the last 30 days

While we see mega deals in the video game world for titles like Angry Birds and social companies like Zynga preparing for multi-billion dollar IPOs - let's keep in mind part of the reason for this is that everyone it seems will pay for games on their phones. Consider in fact Nielsen found 93 percent of app downloaders are willing to pay for the games they play.

The Stuxnet worm alleged to be the work of Israel and the US was designed to target and disable Iranian centrifuges by increasing their speeds to dangerous levels while reporting to operators that all was well. The latest report from the New York Times shows this worm has also hit five industrial sites in the land of Ahmadinejad.

It’s no secret most of the world does not want Iran to get nuclear weapons and the best weapon being used to deter the country’s nuclear program was sanctions and if they are working it would be tough to know it as the country are prospering greatly as the price of oil is much higher than what Iran has budgeted.